Depending on your ear, modern metal isn't very "heavy"

[DesecratorJ]

These bands still sounds pretty modern to me, even if they are supposed to represent the old school sound of speed/thrash imo.

[NinjaLiquidator]

Cause the sound has better quality. Nowadays songs are comparable with bands before, you just have nostalgic factor shadowing your mind. 10 years after you will complain that it was better NOW.

[Mr. Freeze]

>Neo-Thrash

 

Vomit-inducing. Thrash wore itself out in 1992. 

 

Not the heaviest band ever, but heavy enough to qualify as "modern heavy music" 

[june gloom]

On 7/28/2017 at 6:26 PM, Ajora said:

 

Seriously, grow up. I'd rather associate myself with musical elitists than a cantankerous pleb who has the temperament of a child. You're whining about metal not being experimental enough (which is stupid), you're whining about metal having a juvenile image (which is ironic), and you're whining about metal fans being snobby. You're throwing stones in a glass house.

lol. Y'all take this shit seriously enough to get outrageously angry at someone on the internet, but I've the temperament of a child. Right. I'm entitled to my opinion same as you guys are, not my problem if you can't handle a lone dissenter.

 

I wasn't even serious with my last post, I was just being contrary.

[[McD] James]

Saying I was "outrageously angry at someone on the internet" is quite the stretch. And yes, you do have the temperament of a child. It's not your opinions so much as it's how you present them. If you want to be treated like an adult, then you should consider acting like one. 

[june gloom]

Says the person with the anime icon, but what do I know, I'm just a cantankerous pleb. I'm sorry I don't like your music.

[Koko Ricky]

This is getting pretty tangential. Maybe I worded the topic poorly, but this is about the use of compression to artificially make music louder, not about what makes a riff heavy.

[kb1]

9 hours ago, GoatLord said:

This is getting pretty tangential. Maybe I worded the topic poorly, but this is about the use of compression to artificially make music louder, not about what makes a riff heavy.

Think of each sound wave as a fan at a massive concert. Now, take all 12,000 of them and put them in the exit room of E1M1. Keep compressing them until they all fit. More energy, or less? Less, cause they can't frickin move (or breathe). That's compression.

 

[Koko Ricky]

I know what compression is.

[everennui]

The way I feel about it is, who decided distortion is heavy?

 

I much prefer the sound of tube amps with overdrive and a tube screamer.

 

Metal is too cookie cutter. There's too many expectations that need to be met. 

 

I like the foreboding, the eerie and the strange. The musicality of the song is what make makes it feel heavy to me. "Metal" pretty much stole that word and diminished it to a word that already exists - gain. 

 

A lot of metal is too high in the mid-range and I don't find it enjoyable for my ears. I think it's over compression. Everything gets too muddled up and washed out. For this reason I don't find the dynamic range interesting enough. It feels like, "human music" where you just have something playing in the background as opposed to a musical journey.

 

I'm mostly referring to stuff I hear sometimes when the pop stations go to commercials when I, for whatever reason, listen to the radio. I'm not a metal enthusiast by any means. 

 

I'd rather listen to music recorded live, and in one take. That feels more honest to me. DAWs are great and everybody uses them, but it makes things too easy. A lot of songs that are recorded are put together in pieces, that have been overly rehearsed and become void of nuisance and idiosyncrasies that make music feel organic. 

 

It's too easy to record yourself playing something over and over until you have it down, move to the next and repeat until you have enough pieces to assemble a song. I don't like this. Metal is probably the worst for this because there is an expectation for proficient and fast playing.

 

I also love scales, but I think the best scale is the chromatic scale.  A lot of popular music doesn't deviate from the mold and it is 100% predictable for me.

 

As always there's always exceptions and there are entire genres that contradict me, but in general the current state of metal doesn't pique my interest. I don't get excited for it. 

[lazygecko]

Loudness is a completely relative term. It can't really exist without anything to compare it with. Thus within the framework of a track, or an album, if everything is loud 100% of the time, then nothing is, really.

 

The loudness war as a social phenomenom is kind of fascinating once you get into really studying the history of it. It's heavily intertwined with radio and the mastering industry. I have my own theory about the latter where its modern incarnation is basically a glorified scam industry akin to astrology.

 

The loudness war started with radio stations competing with eachother for attention and how they started processing their signals. There were technically two of them, with the first in the early 80's where stations simply started overmodulating their analog FM signals, and this escalated to the point where they actually started bleeding into other radio frequencies, so it didn't take long for legislators to drop the hammer on that. The second loudness war as we know it today started later when radio engineers started macgyvering their own multi-band compressors (that's how they were invented. Didn't exist as commercial products prior to that) to squash their signals with more surgical efficiency. After this was normalized, artists and bands started asking studio engineers why they couldn't just get that signature "radio sound" on their music straight away, so it all snowballed from there.

 

At the same time, as digital formats for consumers was starting to phase out vinyl and tape in the market, I'm guessing the mastering industry was starting to feel paranoid about getting marginalized once the rest would start to figure out that their services would no longer really be that important considering the difference between analog and digital mastering. When transfering analog signals to analog formats, there's so much that can go wrong on the way, so an entire profession had been established for the task which required surgical efficiency and specific equipment. But with digital, it's the exact same binary data from one end to the other. Like any human being, all those mastering engineers probably wanted to keep their comfortable jobs. So they started to rebrand their services around more vague and romanticized notions of signal processing, and this all coincided with the rise of the loudness war which they were quick to leverage for their marketability.

[Agentbromsnor]

As someone who plays in two metal bands, I know how much of a pain mixing can be when it comes to the extreme metal genres in particular. We're currently in the process of recording vocals for one of my bands, and when that's done it's up to our bassist to mix everything into one coherent listening experience. I think it's worth nothing that when you put this much gain into your sound, you're bound to end up with a loud mess, unless you turn it into a compressed sound-sandwich. A lot of metal bands these days use not only multiple tracks of heavily distorted guitars (for both the left and right channel), but also use a lot of overdrive on the bass-guitar. Since all of this is usually fairly similar in frequency, it's no wonder that this can often be conflicting in a mix. If you're not willing to use compressors, I think this is something you need to keep in mind.

Back in the old days, most of the bands were dealing with just a handful of tracks to record on. Nowadays, with the advent of soft-synths and powerful computers, you can have as many instruments as you like, but most music producers don't like to think ahead of the plan. When they're composing / producing their demo, they're not likely to think of how much of a nightmare it's going to be to have someone turn a 50+ track nightmare project into one coherent song.

[Koko Ricky]

Yeah, too much multi-tracking can definitely contribute to suffocating the production, in addition to compression and too much gain. There was a tendency, in the early days of metal, to utilize pedal effects, to give room for everything to breathe, and to be unafraid to experiment with a variety of timbres, rather than settling on a somewhat homogenous class of distortion that most modern metal gravitates toward. 

[Mr. Freeze]

7 hours ago, GoatLord said:

Yeah, too much multi-tracking can definitely contribute to suffocating the production, in addition to compression and too much gain. There was a tendency, in the early days of metal, to utilize pedal effects, to give room for everything to breathe, and to be unafraid to experiment with a variety of timbres, rather than settling on a somewhat homogenous class of distortion that most modern metal gravitates toward. 

I blame Fractal Audio and EMG

[kb1]

On 8/4/2017 at 11:12 PM, GoatLord said:

I know what compression is.

I know you do. I just wanted to make my analogy :)

 

@lazygecko Interesting (and sad) - I'd love to read more about this.

 

@Agentbromsnor For me, the secret is in not being afraid of turning levels down during mixing, keeping everything from clipping at the end. On a personal note, I am surprised about distorted bass - that seems like it would really put a damper on the sheer power, risking a muddy sound. Maybe not always, I guess. As for the guitars, I can sometimes get into some light compression, for sustain, if it's the first stage right out of the undistorted guitar.

 

People nowadays would probably say I needed a bit more distortion, but I just don't like it at max. I like a good crunch, but also to be able to turn down the guitar volume for a nearly clean sound, but not lacking volume.

 

2 bands? How does everyone else handle that? (I've experienced the problems it can cause). Good for you, if you can pull it off. Got any material I can check out?

[Ribbiks]

On 7/29/2017 at 8:33 PM, Mr. Freeze said:

>Neo-Thrash

 

Vomit-inducing. Thrash wore itself out in 1992. 

 

Similarly, I'm of the stance that by 1998 all the djent albums that ever needed to be made had been done already :p

 

Using this thread as an excuse to post metal production I like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah8wtUVCLBo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYKKmbf2J3g

[Cynical]

On ‎6‎/‎29‎/‎2017 at 8:59 PM, Doomkid said:

I thought this was going to be about BPM and riff style based on the title. A good mix is a good mix and a bad mix is a bad mix, regardless of genre. Any producer worth anything should know to make sure every instrument has "breathing room" in it's given frequency range. Too many instruments turned up too loud and all shoved into the same range is gonna sound like total crap on everything from country to dance music.

 

It would be nice if more smaller scale bands bothered to take just a few days to learn the basics about this stuff. You can have the greatest riffs in the world but your album is gonna be poo if it's not properly mixed.

Tracking is far more important than mixing.  If you do a good job tracking, you can get away with little more than setting relative levels, HPF/LPF, compression on the vocals (and bass if you're DIing), and maybe doing a couple of EQ sweeps to find and notch out ugly frequencies if you recorded the guitar in a room that isn't treated.  If your tracking is bad and the bass and kickdrum you recorded are sitting in the same frequency spectrum or the guitar was recorded by some idiot who put the bass knob to "10" and it's booming all over the low end or the guitarist cranked the Presence knob in a band with traditionally-pitched vocals, trying to fix that with post-EQ is going to sound like shit no matter what.

 

EDIT: Also, all of you longing for "dead silence between chugs" or whatever, that isn't going to happen without ludicrous pro-tooling.  Plugged-in electric guitars make some noise even when you mute the strings, and the transient from a loud note to a mute in particular isn't anything close to 100% clean unless you've got a really aggressive noise gate going both before the amp and in the effects loop, and using such a gate is going to make everything sound really artificial (you'll lose all string and pick noise).  Also, guitars on most metal albums are quad-tracked, and no four performances are going to be 100% identical and sit right on each other; if you're not quantizing the guitars in post (and if your band does quantize guitars in post, you're weak and lame), the levels aren't going to jump up-and-down perfectly like you guys are visualizing.

 

DOUBLE EDIT: Also, anyone who says "no compression on the master bus!" is foolish.  You've probably never heard a record that didn't have some compression added in mastering, no matter how old it is.  Setting the average volume to -18db because of one momentary volume spike on a 40 minute record that would clip at any higher level... LOL NO.  Some volume peaks need to be hit with a compressor a bit; tastefulness is the key.

Edited August 11, 2017 by Cynical

[Koko Ricky]

Cynical, those are some really good points. Any genre of music is going to suffer when each track is overly loud and then squashed by a compressor. Compression is EXTREMELY useful, and is useful even when you're not playing particularly bombastic music. Metal is one of those styles of music that has a very homogenous sound due to the nature of amplification, and it does not benefit from production that brick walls the waveform. 

[lazygecko]

6 hours ago, Cynical said:

DOUBLE EDIT: Also, anyone who says "no compression on the master bus!" is foolish.  You've probably never heard a record that didn't have some compression added in mastering, no matter how old it is.  Setting the average volume to -18db because of one momentary volume spike on a 40 minute record that would clip at any higher level... LOL NO.  Some volume peaks need to be hit with a compressor a bit; tastefulness is the key.

 

There's more than one way to fix a few stray peaks in a track without resorting to destructive normalizing.

[Woolie Wool]

The quad tracking and amplification used on guitars on modern metal is utterly ridiculous. We've had an entire generation (or two) of metal bands who seem to think the only instruments anyone should be able to follow are guitars and drums. And if you're doing that because your singer can't sing and/or your bassist can't play, FIRE THEM and find people who can.

[Cynical]

12 hours ago, lazygecko said:

 

There's more than one way to fix a few stray peaks in a track without resorting to destructive normalizing.

You know that you can compress a few things without touching the rest of the track, right?  A compressor set at a 1:2 ratio set at a ratio high enough that it engages about three times over the song isn't going to brickwall a waveform.

 

4 hours ago, Woolie Wool said:

The quad tracking and amplification used on guitars on modern metal is utterly ridiculous. We've had an entire generation (or two) of metal bands who seem to think the only instruments anyone should be able to follow are guitars and drums. And if you're doing that because your singer can't sing and/or your bassist can't play, FIRE THEM and find people who can.

Eh, bands have been quad tracking rhythm guitars forever (it's been standard since at least the late '70s), and Metallica's used more gain on the guitars on Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets than probably any metal band in the last two generations.  The real shift has been in bands realizing that when the lead melodic instrument is the guitars, they should probably be emphasized more than the vocals.  As far as bass goes, you're hearing it; you just don't realize it because it's playing the same thing the guitars are, and doing so fairly tightly.  If someone muted the bass track, you'd notice it instantly.

[Woolie Wool]

A good bass tone, if the guitars aren't hogging everything, can be heard over the guitars no matter what is being played. Listen to Overkill's The Years of Decay, Anthrax's Persistence of Time, or most Bolt Thrower albums. In the latter two it even drives the riffs more than the guitars do; the guitars fill out a rhythmic line provided by the bass.

[Cynical]

The reason the bass can be heard on most Bolt Thrower albums has nothing to do with the tone or the mix and everything to do with the fact that Bolt Thrower are somewhat loose players (and I don't mean this as a knock on Bolt Thrower -- Realm of Chaos, in particular is one of the best albums ever -- but if they were playing as precisely as, say, Suffocation on Pierced from Within, the bass would fade to that point it does in most other bands where you don't notice it unless it's not there).

 

The guitar tone on that Overkill album is weak as piss; sacrificing all power out of your lead instrument (again, in metal that's the rhythm guitar) so that the bass is more prominent is a terrible decision.  I'd take the sound of "South of Heaven" over that any day.

[Mr. Freeze]

As a bassist myself, I'd say it has more to do with the playing style and attack of the bassist on their instrument over the production, generally speaking. 

[DesecratorJ]

Eh, I don't like the sound of both Overkill "The Years of Decay" and Slayer's "South of Heaven". I agree about the guitar being shity on that one though. I would take "Taking Over" or Show no mercy/Hell Awaits over them easily.

 

Yeah, the playing style is obviously a part of this. But sometimes they just put down the bass volume in the mix for whatever reasons.

[Cynical]

Hell Awaits is my favorite Slayer album; I picked South of Heaven as the example because it's one of the ones that's infamous for the bass supposedly being inaudible.

 

Hell Awaits is actually a really good example; bass is lower in the mix than it was on Reign in Blood or South of Heaven, but it's more audible because the playing was looser.

[kb1]

 

On 8/10/2017 at 9:05 PM, Cynical said:

Tracking is far more important than mixing.  If you do a good job tracking, you can get away with little more than setting relative levels, HPF/LPF, compression on the vocals (and bass if you're DIing), and maybe doing a couple of EQ sweeps to find and notch out ugly frequencies if you recorded the guitar in a room that isn't treated.  If your tracking is bad and the bass and kickdrum you recorded are sitting in the same frequency spectrum or the guitar was recorded by some idiot who put the bass knob to "10" and it's booming all over the low end or the guitarist cranked the Presence knob in a band with traditionally-pitched vocals, trying to fix that with post-EQ is going to sound like shit no matter what.

 

EDIT: Also, all of you longing for "dead silence between chugs" or whatever, that isn't going to happen without ludicrous pro-tooling.  Plugged-in electric guitars make some noise even when you mute the strings, and the transient from a loud note to a mute in particular isn't anything close to 100% clean unless you've got a really aggressive noise gate going both before the amp and in the effects loop, and using such a gate is going to make everything sound really artificial (you'll lose all string and pick noise).  Also, guitars on most metal albums are quad-tracked, and no four performances are going to be 100% identical and sit right on each other; if you're not quantizing the guitars in post (and if your band does quantize guitars in post, you're weak and lame), the levels aren't going to jump up-and-down perfectly like you guys are visualizing.

 

DOUBLE EDIT: Also, anyone who says "no compression on the master bus!" is foolish.  You've probably never heard a record that didn't have some compression added in mastering, no matter how old it is.  Setting the average volume to -18db because of one momentary volume spike on a 40 minute record that would clip at any higher level... LOL NO.  Some volume peaks need to be hit with a compressor a bit; tastefulness is the key.

Good points, but a bit of a ridiculous nod to the extremes. Yes, high-impedance guitar pickups will pick up some AC hum. No one suggested 100% silence between chugs (that occur less than 500 ms. apart), or -18dB required (which would bump the signal-to-noise *way* down, and severely increase low-amplitude aliasing in digital media). A spike is different than full-on idiotic clipping (or the nearly equivalent: moronic aggressive compression of the first post). Yes, tastefullness... which should kick in after following the absolute rules first. Yes, compression, especially 2-stage, bucket-brigade (called "digital delay" these days), can be used to solve some minor issues, or even provide some sustain to an instrument. But if you need post-mix compression, I'd be scrambling to try and find what went wrong at the front end, before going down that road.

 

Then again, you could be going for a specific concept. Each situation is different. Each tool can be a weapon in your arsenal, if you know what it does and how to use it. I tend to prefer clean dirt, myself, but that's just me.

 

[Koko Ricky]

There's an interesting perceptual aspect to modern production/mixing techniques. For instance, the "breathing and pumping" aesthetic that is so popular in modern EDM and the like is a result of compressing the drums to the point that the kick and snare have an attack so strong, the other instruments are briefly drowned out, causing this constant, steady fluctuation in the signal. To someone like me, that's bad mixing; you've compressed the drums too much and now the music sounds out of whack. But to the producer, it presents a different type of listening experience that is desired by some. One person's garbage is another person's aesthetic.

 

Similarly, the brickwalling of modern metal (and other predominantly loud forms of music) causes listener fatigue in me, and is not particularly "loud" in the dynamic sense, while plenty of listeners find it to be preferable to the wider, softer sense of auditory space that is characteristic of older recordings.

 

And @Cynical, about your comment on bass...boy oh boy, do I have beef with bass in metal. If it's older metal, no problem. During the 70s and 80s, the art of amplification was in its adolescence and thus did not become the overbearing beast it is today. Bass was much easier to pick out in a lot of recordings, but as you move toward the 90s, it becomes emphasized increasingly less. Interestingly, the rise of groove metal—Pantera, Korn, Infectious Grooves, White Zombie, etc.—gave bass more of the prominence it needs in heavy music. But within death metal and grindcore circles, it generally took a backseat, and rarely were there producers interested in really giving the bass its own timbre so that it contrasted properly with the guitars. And black metal? Fuhgettaboutit! It's perhaps the most treble-focused sub-genre in metal, and at least in the past, its tinny shrillness preventing most bass frequencies from being heard. Of course, there's also a certain breed of black metal—Finnish bands like Archgoat and Ride for Revenge, or Canadian "war metal" like Revenge and Conqueror—that is extremely bass focused.

[kb1]

@GoatLordTotally agree with all of this. I couldn't have said it better (or as well). That "breathing and pumping" thing you describe reminds me of the shitty auto-gain control of those monaural cassette recorders of the 80s, or when someone tries to record a concert, in the front row. Ugh! Avoid.

 

I very much prefer a clean analogy bass with plenty of dynamic range, to produce all the slap pops (which may temporarily clip), and finger slides characteristic of cool bass, while having the presence to enforce the key of the others, and essentially drive the message through. It's a shame what is done with it these days. Then again, I guess some bass players just suck, but then why are they there? I'd be pissed if I was the bass player, being mixed into oblivion.

[UglyStru]

I may be the odd one out here, but I actually prefer newer metal over the older stuff. Sound quality is a big part of it, but I'm also not a huge fan of the 80s-style metal voices we hear in Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, etc.. 

 

I also don't think it's safe to compare Cannibal Corpse and Black Sabbath. They are two WAY different styles of metal.

 

Anyway, newer metal seems to have a wider range of frequencies that are usually mastered really well. With newer technology comes better sound.

 

Spoiler

 

 

--------------------------------------

 

This song I found ended up having a lot of influence on the older style, but incorporated the use of good EQing, synthesizers, etc. 

Spoiler

 

 

Mind you I haven't pulled either of these tracks into Audacity to compare, but there is a lot of music out there that will have similar waveforms to Black Sabbath. It just may not be what we know as "metal" today because a lot of people just want fucking blast beats, pig squeals, and breakdowns. 

Edited August 23, 2017 by stru